Twins Talk: What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society

Twins

Talk

What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society

Dona Lee Davis

Ohio University Press Athens, Ohio

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davis, Dona Lee, 1948–

Twins talk : what twins tell us about person, self, and society / Dona Lee Davis.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-2111-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8214-2112-3 (pb) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4499-3 (pdf)

1. Twins—United States. 2. Twins—Social aspects—United States. 3. Ethnology. I. Title.

GN63.6.D38 2015

306.8750973—dc23

2014029923

Acknowledgments

The idea of studying twins grew out of my experiences in giving a series of lectures on embodiment, self, and society at the University of Tromsø in Norway in the 1990s. During that time there was a considerable controversy among the indigenous Norwegian Sami people and representatives of the Human Genome Diversity Project. The controversies whet my curiosity about the relationships between genes and identity, but in a way that was much closer to home—the home of my own body. A study of twins promised to offer some interesting insights into many intersecting planes of experience and analysis, among which are body/biology, personal/social identity, relatedness/relationality, and culture. The two-day research opportunities offered at the Twinsburg, Ohio, Twins Days Festival made it all seem feasible. After having done fieldwork among fishers in Newfoundland and northern Norway, I found the prospect of conducting a study in an area where I had an insider’s perspective based on my own lifetime of firsthand experiences of being a twin—of finally becoming a local expert—very inviting. Twins Talk as an exercise in quick ethnography was also developed as a way for my identical twin sister, Dorothy, and me to spend some time together. My intent at its most ambitious was to present some conference papers and perhaps an article or two. I had not anticipated how interesting twins would be to think with, and what started as a short-term project evolved into a much more involved endeavor.

As I became a twin researcher myself and became more and more immersed in the popular and scientific twin literature, I was put off by the predominating biological and genetic essentialism of twin research and the inherent pathologization of twinship or the twin relationship, most prominently in psychology but in other disciplines as well. Identical twins are variously depicted as clones, as a self and almost self inside the same physical package, and as a single unit or closed society of two. These characterizations seem to have minimal relevance to my own more than six decades of being a twin. What did resonate with my anthropological curiosity, however, were the contentions that identical twins are an unsettling presence that undermines a sense of uniqueness or challenges characterizations of selfhood in the wider (Western) society. My goal became twofold: First, to explicate just what those assumptions or characterization of selfhood were. And second, to provide a voice for twins in this process. Thus it is the intent of Twins Talk to quite literally address what twins tell us about the experience of being twins in Western society. And in turn, Twins Talk becomes a vehicle for comparing twins’ own narratives of their being in the world to the narratives of those who have made twins topics of research. In the process, there emerges a very rich and rewarding source for informed anthropological analysis as it intersects with multiple other disciplines.

Many people over the years have helped with this Twins Talk Study. I would like to thank the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Tromsø in Norway (now the Arctic University of Norway) and the Twins Days Festival Committee for their research grants that helped fund this study. The University of South Dakota (USD) Tuve Fund provided travel funds for Kristi Cody, the projects research assistant, as well as travel funds that enabled Dona to present papers at a number of professional conferences. Kristi Cody, an anthropology major at USD, was an enthusiastic and energetic research assistant. Sandy Miller and the Twins Days Festival Committee provided invaluable help and encouragement during the initial stages of this study. Angela Harrison successfully took on the challenging job of transcribing many hours of taped four-way conversations. Evie Clerx, Danielle Emond, Elizabeth Johnson, and, all USD undergraduate students, have also worked with me on this project. Thanks also go to Jane Nadel-Klein, Gisli Pálsson, Barbara Prainsack, and Elizabeth Stewart for their encouragement and support of the project. Of course, special thanks go to the forty-four twins who participated in the Twinsburg Twins Talk Study, taking the time to sit down and share their lives and experiences of being twins. I hope they enjoyed these conversations. I certainly did. Their stories helped confirm how interesting and wonderful it is to be a twin. Extra special thanks to my twin sister, Dorothy Davis, who played an essential role in the data gathering and attended three festivals with me. It was the first time in our lives that we had the opportunity to talk as twins to twins. Finally, thanks to Richard Whitten, my life partner, whose love and support I will always treasure.

1: Twinscapes

A Sufi teaching story tells of the holy fool Mulla Nasrudin who ventured to a strange city. Before he left on his journey, his wife put a sign around his neck with his name on it so that he would not forget his identity. When he arrived, he spent the first night at a caravanserai; while he slept, a joker took the sign and put it around his own neck. When the Mulla awoke, he was appalled to find his name tag on the joker’s chest. It seems, he cried, that you are me. But if you are me, then who am I?

—Lindholm 2001

Each individual is biologically unique.

—Pálsson 2007

What would it be like to have lived one’s whole life without ever having seen your own face?

—Herdt 1999

Like Charles Lindholm, I begin my book with a fool’s tale. Lindholm (2001, 3) places the Sufi story at the very beginning of his book Culture and Identity, in chapter 1, titled Who Am I? The Search for the Self. He comments that although the Mulla’s dilemma is ridiculous, it nonetheless raises central issues concerning the development of a more culturally sensitive or nuanced understanding of one’s sense of someoneness, or identity. The physical body, perceptions of self in relation to other selves, and self as positioned or situated and acting within a wider cultural milieu are all essential components of one’s sense of self (de Munck 2000; Markus et al. 1997). Yet, if you are an identical twin, Mulla’s ridiculous dilemma becomes a kind of double entendre. In the case of identical twins, the fool’s tale becomes real. There actually is someone else who is wearing the visual signs of your identity on their face and body. Twins’ physical similarities often result in others confusing, confounding, and conflating their self-identities. Moreover, for twins raised together, their senses of someoneness develop in a dyadic, coexistent mutuality, or sharing of place and space that actually begins before birth. It should come as no surprise that the academic literature, as well as popular imagination, depicts identical twins as living embodiments of two related questions: What is truly other and what is self? and Is it possible to inhabit another person’s being? (Neimark 1997, 3).

Situating Twinscapes

This is a book about situating twinscapes. Twinscapes refers not only to the visual resemblances of the surfaces of twins’ bodies, but also to their side-by-side appearance as a pair. This book is about twins who look alike and share space and place. As such, it focuses on twins whose physical likeness is so marked that their identities are easily confused by others.1Twinscapes as presented in this text also implies not only a view of two look-alike bodies but visions of hundreds or even thousands of twins attending twins festivals and performing their twinship for the gaze of others. Twinscapes as developed in Twins Talk also include identification and explanation of the various ways in which twins are subjected to the gaze of academic researchers as they in turn reflect popular or normative cultural ideals related to notions such as identity, autonomy, and mutuality. My aim is to go beyond the observations of researchers who objectify twins and view them as forever silent: frozen side by side in photographs, or reduced to their genes, particular body parts, or a series of testable independent and dependent variables. Many of the deeper questions of twinship, such as the possibilities of inhabiting each other’s being, of being betwixt and between, of being simultaneously unique and contingent, are raised in only a symbolically abstract or rhetorical sense (Farmer 1996). There is no voice for twins themselves, as agents of biosocial becoming (cf. Ingold and Pálsson 2013), in this research. How they, as twins, actively construct and negotiate their own twinscapes remains invisible, under the research radar, so to speak. As instruments or objects of research, even anthropologists tend to portray twins in terms of essentialized or generic cultural identities such as Ndembu twins in central Africa or twins in Haiti. Twinscapes, however, are actively situated or positioned within the twin dyad itself. In this view twinscapes illustrate twins’ own perspectives on themselves as twins in a singleton world. It includes the ways twins see how others view them and also their perceptions of each other. Twins’ views on living in and having identical bodies, on their twinship or relational bond, and on daily living with a cultural persona that is both lauded and ridiculed are not always in accord with the vision of twins researchers.

The purpose of this book is to show how identical twins, like the surprised Mulla, challenge commonplace notions of identity. Most books on twins deal with behavioral genetics, the psychology of twins, or how to best raise twins (Piontelli 2008); target audiences are other twins researchers, clinicians, educators, and parents of twins. As in the popular and scientific twin research literature, this book engages the biological/genetic and psychological/relational attributes of twins and twinship. Yet, when it comes to grappling with the Who am I? questions raised by twins, this book takes some innovative stances.

First, as the title states, Twins Talk seeks to capture the insider’s experiences of twinship. This study features and privileges twins’ own words about how they actively negotiate lifelong challenges raised by the Who am I? question. For identical twins, however, the Who am I? (as what is truly self and what is truly other) question hardly ends the story. Self-talk among identical twins also raises issues and questions of Who are you? How are you me? How are you not me? as well as Who are we? How and when should I be me? and How and when should I be we?

Second, I aim to present and analyze the positive as well as negative aspects of the twin experience that go beyond simple platitudes, such as having a friend for life or having a special bond. My focus is on the lived, grounded, day-to-day, and lifetime practical experiences and challenges of being twins. Third, if twins are a mirror of us all (cf. Wright 1997), then it is necessary to make the us all more explicit. If identical twins undermine our notions of a unique self, then what exactly is this unique self? In Twins Talk my aim is to subject Western culture to a critical analysis by comparing and contrasting the selving styles depicted in twins talk to self stylings across a variety of historical and cultural contexts.

Twin Research

Scientific perspectives on twins are at best ambivalent. Early nineteenth- century twins researchers (Cool 2007, 7) portrayed twins as both monsters and wonders existing at a tripartite nexus of horror, pleasure, and repugnance. Today, the fields of biology, biomedicine, and psychology dominate the scientific literature on twins. Issues of heredity, although going through a major paradigm shift, continue to dominate biological studies of twins (Charney 2012; Spector 2012). The older school of genetic determinism (Bouchard Jr. and Popling 1993; Galton 1875), viewing nuclear DNA as a blueprint for self, emphasized the genetic identicalness of twins as shared inherited traits rooted in or reducible to biology and little influenced by environmental factors. Emphasis is placed on sameness or being the same. Genetically identical twins in this modeling of genetic inheritance are referred to as clones (Wright 1997) or contemporary clones (Charney 2012; Prainsack and Spector 2006; Spector 2012). In contrast, the more recent emerging field of epigenetics (Charlemaine 2002; Peltonen 2007) focuses on heritable changes not due to structures of DNA but due to cellular mechanisms that turn genes off and on. Stressing genetic flexibility and adaptation, this postgenomic view focuses on inter-twin epigenetic differences—or what Spector (2012) terms twins who are identically different. Rather than differentiate between genes and environment, epigenetics moves away from the older ideas of genetic determinism and introduces news, more interactive ways of thinking about genes and their environment in terms of flexibility and adaptation (Charney 2012). Despite their differences, both paradigms present a gene-centered view aimed at discovering the hidden or subcellular life universes of twins.

If genetics reduces twins to their genes, biomedicine pathologizes twins by focusing on complications of pregnancy and birth for the mothers as well as the twins (Piontelli 2008). The twin relationship or bond is and has been a continual focus of twin research in the field of psychology. While their closely developed emotional ties or intense closeness (Klein 2003) may be celebrated as a unique dyadic capacity to understand and be understood (Bacon 2005; Piontelli 2008; Rosambeau 1987), psychologists tend to describe twins as somehow aberrant or compromised selves and as at risk for a wide range of psychological impairments (Conley 2004; Kamin 1994) and illnesses (Joseph 2004). Twins portrayed as genetically the same and as too close raise an interesting range of sociocultural issues about biological and psychological identity, as well as issues concerning autonomy and mutuality (Battaglia 1995a; Maddox 2006; Prainsack and Spector 2006; Prainsack, Cherkas, and Spector 2007). Like psychologists, sociologists are concerned with the development of a normative independent self and how the closeness and intimacy of twins may complicate identity both within the inter-twin relationship and twins’ relationships with the wider social worlds in which they live (Klein 2003). Anthropologists have tended to focus on twins, as a generic category, in terms of exotic attitudes, beliefs, and practices (such as ritual and infanticide) in faraway, non-Western cultures (Dorothy Davis 1971; Diduk 1993; Granzberg 1973; Lester 1986; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Stewart 2003; Turner 1967).

The notion that twins pose and encounter difficulties in the process of identity formation is as pervasive in popular culture as it is in science (Joseph 2004). Twins have been popularly portrayed as objects of wonder, fascination, and fear since the beginning of recorded history (Schave and Ciriello 1983; Klein 2003). Identical twins have been described as seeing double (Wagner 2003), as eerily similar (Neimark 1997), as unwitting dancers choreographed by genes or fate (Neimark 1997, 2), as individuality-burdened freaks of nature (Maddox 2006), and as a walking sideshow with four legs (Schave and Ciriello 1983). Twins are disparaged as having mutual or symbiotic identities, as being two halves of the same self (Neimark 1997), as being self and almost self inside the same physical package (Wright 1997), or as being a closed society of two (Kamin 1974).

Fault Lines and Deviant Persona

Whether characterized as an unsettling presence or exceptional exceptions, identical twins may be viewed as what anthropologists have described as a kind of deviant cultural persona (Holland and Leander 2004, 279) or as located on the fault lines (Conklin and Morgan 1996) of identity.2These concepts will become central to my analysis in Twins Talk. First, the notion of fault lines helps explicate the us and who as in Wright’s (1997) What Twins Tell Us about Who We Are, or what exactly is the customary order that twins cause a rift in (Neimark 1997). Identical twins exist on the fault lines to the extent that they challenge, confound, or deviate from normative expectations about self, personhood, and identity. Twins challenge natural assumptions that every individual’s body is biologically distinct and unique. For example, Herdt (1999) asks his readers to imagine what a sense of self would be like—as among the mirror-less Sambia he describes—if you have never seen your own face and only see yourself reflected in the faces of others. Yet, for identical twins, there is actually someone else walking around with your face and body. In addition, identical twins, in terms of their relationship within the twin dyad, also embody and enact a series of tensions or dialectical qualities of identity held to be characteristic of Western culture. In the spirit of Mulla’s question, If you are me, then who am I? (Lindholm 2001, 3), identical twins bridge dualisms of same and different, autonomy and mutuality, separate and connected, and self and other, as well as you and me and us and them. Farmer (1996) philosophically refers to this as a kind of symbolic double duality.

From a more practical perspective, twins have to live in a singleton-dominated world where their respective identities can become confused or conflated and their relationship or twinship, rooted in long-term intimate sharing of space and place, is denigrated more than praised. Twins are not only located on the fault lines; they live on the fault lines. In this sense, identical twins constitute a cultural persona as they collaborate to interactively microproduce and perform a twin identity and position their selves as twins (Holland and Leander 2004) both vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis the wider singleton-]dominated world in which they live. Mol (2003) describes identical twins as embodying a kind of fluid space where boundaries are not always demarcated and bonds between the elements (self/other) are not always stable. But stereotypical portraits of twins, passively embodying fluid space or existing on the fault lines, fail to see or incorporate an insider’s perspective. Identical twins are active agents in their own experiential worlds. As twins they interrogate, oftentimes rather militantly, commonsense assumptions of what it means to be a person. In so doing, they advocate and enact alternative models of identity, relation, and selfhood within the wider domains of Western culture. Twins’ own twinscapes provide an interesting perspective for consideration of how personhood may be worked through the body in thought and action as well as how images of the body serve as enactments of the social and moral ethos (Conklin and Morgan 1996; Csordas 1994). Identical twins offer an opportunity to examine a multiplicity of constructions and lived experiences of self and other in terms of intracultural diversity as well as in a comparative, cross-cultural context.

In writing this book, I am acutely aware that writing about famous or freaky twins sells books. Audiences and readers want to hear or read stuff about twins that confirms their weirdest stereotypes of them. I am frequently contacted by popular journalists looking for interesting angles on twins. Recently a BBC documentary producer contacted me to ask if I had any really weird twins in my sample. She gave me an example of two twin women in Holland who had never married and lived together all their lives. The filmmaker was interested in any cases I might know of schizophrenic twins or other twins who were abnormally bonded. When I told her my work was with normal twins and my goal was to normalize twinship, she expressed no further interest in my studies. In the stereotypical view that this particular filmmaker wants to pursue, twins are not straddling the fault lines, they have fallen over the cliff; they are not deviating from an established norm, but are beyond the pale altogether.

At the same time, however, twins are also a more common phenomenon. Globally, today, there are over eleven million identical twins (Spector 2012). Although twins are exoticized in many ways, most of us have firsthand, personal knowledge of twins. A friend, neighbor, schoolmate, or coworker may well be a twin or have twins in the family. Oftentimes, when I lecture about twins, someone in the audience will respond with something to the effect that My daughter has three sets of twins in her elementary school and really, they have none of the identity issues you describe. All the other kids know who they are and can tell them apart. Really, it’s no big deal. During my first in-class lecture on twins, a student raised her hand and said, I’m a twin and really, I don’t find myself or other twins all that scary or creepy. Clearly, day-to-day acquaintances and personal interactions with twins both normalize twinship and elucidate and resolve a series of identity issues for those closely associated with them. What remains unspoken and underanalyzed, and probably is not so obvious unless you are a twin yourself (as my student’s comment illustrates), is the active roles that twins take on, individually and together, to educate or socialize singletons on how to deal with the identity issues that they raise. Jenna, a participant in this study, makes this patently clear:

Jenna: There are more differences in twins than what people who are not twins just don’t understand. They think we look the same so we are the same. We’re not. We’re different people. And they don’t get that concept. I think it’s why twins zero in on the differences, because everyone else sees them as being so similar. We’re not. And people get us mixed up and I’m like, Hello!

Twins raised in Western society are like the singleton majority and different from it. Twins Talk is about how twins go about normalizing, expressing, and performing their identity and relationship vis-à-vis other sets of twins and how they utilize their twinship to reconfigure normality and navigate their own selfways (Neisser 1997), or characteristic ways of being twins in the singleton world. Like, Hello! as voiced by Jenna, implies the roles twins must take on as they challenge the stereotypes that singletons may have about twins. All twins do this. To the extent that they are together, they do it pretty much all the time. This I call self work (Goodman 2008) or self styling. Self work is a complex business because it involves both actions as individuals and actions as twins. Poised on or viewed from the fault lines, twins embody selfways that both integrate their selves into wider, normative selfways and mark them as deviant. Singletons and the dominant culture hold stereotypes or characterizations of identical twins that identical twins both buy into and challenge with their own counterhegemonic self stylings. In so doing twins also take an active and interactive role in the process of ‘selving’ (Markus, Mullally, and Kitayama 1997, 13). By self styling I mean that once having adopted or established their mutual and individual identities, twins act to maintain the integrity of those identities (Neisser 1988, 36). Thus, being located on the fault lines, combating stereotypes, presenting alternative self stylings, while all the time fitting in, requires a great deal of self work on the part of twins.

Self working is part of the practical experiences of twinship, often noted by researchers, but never (Prainsack et al. 2007) investigated in any detail. Located on the fault lines of society, identical twins’ self working both confirms and challenges stereotypes and both bridges and delineates the dualisms of the wider society. Twins self-work as they go about answering Mulla’s Who am I? question.

Twinscapes and Cultural Psychology

Twinscapes are multifaceted, complex, and positioned. The concepts of self work, self styling, and selfways come from the school of cultural psychology. Identical twins, like all other humans, are both natural and social beings. Twins are not monolithic, and it would certainly be misguided to reduce them to their twinship. Their sense of personal and interpersonal identity and experience of twinship is, in turn, embedded in a wider sociocultural context that is also characterized by a great deal of diversity.

A cultural psychology3 approach works well in the discussion of twinscapes, precisely because it is so multifaceted and recognizes multiple points of view (Chapin 2008; Jopling 1997; Markus et al. 1997; Neisser 1997). Not only does a cultural psychology perspective allow me to integrate what has turned out to be a collage of chapters on twins festivals, bodies, bonds, and life cycles drawn from different research venues, it gives primacy to personal, lived experience (Casey and Edgerton 2005; Holland 2001). First, it recognizes diversity or variation between different cultures and historical periods, as well as variations within them. Selfways and self stylings are emergent. They are situated and participate within particular and multiple, sometimes contradictory, contexts. Twins are not simply a category or a uniform group. Nor can or should they be reduced to their twinship. There are substantive differences to be found among them—biologically, cross-culturally, and intraculturally. For example, when it comes to independence and interdependence, two key features of the twin experience, comparisons within and between cultures demonstrate that there are multiple ways to construct and express interdependence and independence. Additionally, a cultural psychology approach positions insiders’ views vis-à-vis outsiders’ representations of them. Not only does this book address twins’ and singletons’ views, it also takes into account twins’ views of singletons’ views of twins. Twins Talk shows how twins are acutely aware that twins researchers have a culture too. Second, cultural psychology recognizes the importance of the embodied, physical, and perceptual self. If a self-system is where the individual as a biological entity becomes a meaningful entity, then identical twins, whose very biological individuality is challenged, undermine key assumptions of self-systems. With highly resembling faces and bodies that are confused or conflated by observers or even characterized as clones with the same underlying genetic blueprints, twins’ self stylings and self work must start from physical baselines that are hardly familiar to singletons. Third, cultural psychology regards a person as not only situated in time and space but having a variety of interpersonal identities and participating in a variety of interpersonal relationships. Twinship, the twin relationship, or the twin bond is both praised and denigrated for its mutuality and is seen as having profound implications when it comes to nontwin relationships.

A cultural psychology approach also works well as a way of engaging the Twins Talk Study as a multisited study that includes participant observation at three twins festivals and two international twin research conferences, narrative data obtained during conversations with twenty-two sets of twins attending the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, plus my own lifelong experiences of twinship with my identical twin sister, Dorothy. By collecting data at festivals where twins celebrate their twinship, by gathering narratives from twins themselves, and by positioning myself as an expert, both as a twin and as a researcher, I view twinscapes through the lens of cultural psychology to compare and contrast twins’ perspectives on the twin condition to the perspectives of scientists who research twins. Twins are good to think with, but twins themselves never get to do much of the thinking. In Twins Talk my focus is on lived experience. Selfways and self work imply a need to get beyond thinking to doing and being (Neisser 1997).4A cultural psychology approach gives twins agency as they negotiate their identities, relationships, and lives in ways that simultaneously set them apart from and integrate them into the wider, normative cultural expectations. Twins rebel, adapt, and refine the Who am I? questions of twinship that in the twin research literature tend to be hegemonically asked and answered by nontwins. Language plays a critical role, and cultural psychology focuses its efforts on the collection and analysis of narrative. When pairs of twins talk about being twins, they present themselves as multifaceted beings in a wide variety of situations and contexts. They agree and disagree with each other, jump from topic to topic, and punctuate their conversation with caresses, slaps, tears, and laughter. The narrative data in this book invite an analytic framework that engages identities (the Who am I? questions) as enacted, imagined, negotiated, and embodied from the ground up (Holland et al. 1998).

Twins Talk is unique in the twin research literature because it seriously, critically, and literally engages the question of what twins tell us about ourselves. In Twins Talk, researchers come into an environment dominated by twins, rather than vice versa. When it comes to the twin research literature, twins are only a database; they neither get to determine and ask the questions nor get to provide their responses on or in their own terms. Rather than see twins as voiceless, passive objects of study, or as the carriers of hidden genetic codes, or as victims of underlying psychodynamic processes, and rather than reduce twins to a series of population-based statistics, a narrative study approaches twins as constructors of and actors in their own dramas. Narrative data from the Twins Talk Study come from sets of twins, in the company of each other, talking about what they feel is important about their experience of being twins. The data have an interactive, dialogic quality about it that is unique in the twin literature. It is the only study I know of that situates analysis in twins’ own twinscapes, which include both twins’ views of themselves and their reactions to others’ (whether family’s, singletons’, the popular culture’s, or scientific researchers’) views of them.

Charles Lindholm (2001) states that understanding implies an imaginative identification with the position of the other. My advocacy of a behind-the-face, experience-near, everyday-life, and lifecycle approach, however, goes beyond an imaginative identification with the other. I am, so to speak, the other. I am an identical twin and my identical twin sister, Dorothy Davis, worked (and played) with me to collect the narrative data for this book. Rather than informants, we refer to these twenty-three sets of twins as our talking partners. As a twin, I take a culturally and experientially (Throop 2003) informed stance to examine the meaning and experiences of twinship among this sample of twins. My personal and interpersonal twinscapes are voiced in Twins Talk. Readers will find a strong auto-ethnographic, reflexive component to this study (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011). To paraphrase Okely (1992, 9), the personal has become theoretical. Through this study I have found myself becoming a militant twin, one who both champions twins and twinship and resists the more negative or medicalized portrayals of twins and the twin condition in the popular and academic literature.

By comparing twins, the twinscapes of twins, and those who research twins, I further employ a cultural psychology approach to address tensions between self stylings within a cultural system. Culturally dominant forms of selving that are more recognized and explicated by twins than researchers do not occur in a power vacuum; not all identities are equal, and selfways exist within frameworks of social inequality and power relationships based on tradition and history. In the overwhelming majority of twin studies (see Segal [1999] for an excellent review of the literature), twins researchers study from the top down. Twins are approached not as people but as a population of study. Scientific researchers tend to objectify twins and reduce or condense the twin experience to quantitative data or a few variables that conform to highly specific research agendas. Twins, as located on the fault lines, do a great deal to make the cultural assumptions of twins researchers more visible. The often counterhegemonic selfways of twins are of particular interest because they challenge, transcend, and conflate many of the dualisms associated with Western culture. These include mind/body, self/other, nature/culture, normal/deviant, autonomy/mutuality, masculine/feminine, and perhaps most important, same/different. In this volume, I use twins talk to explore the notion that scientific researchers also have a culture (Lock 2005; M’Charek 2005; Pálsson 2007). Past and present hereditarians, biomedicine, psychology, and even anthropology could benefit from a more ethnographically informed analysis of twins and twinship. Western twins researchers admit that their samples come from largely middle-class Western populations, but share with many Western researchers the notion of the West versus the Rest, where others have a culture but we do not. They tend to take their own culture as a given. They view culturally informed analyses as suitable for other cultures but not their own.

Throughout and within the chapters of this book, I will compare and contrast the voices of twins themselves to those who research them. Except for Stewart’s (2003) prolegomenon for a social analysis of twinship, there has been little by way of an informed cultural critique or assessment that challenges as culture-bound many of the so-called objective assumptions of primarily Western twins researchers. This leaves twins researchers blind to the variation in constructions of self and personhood, both across societies and within any specific society, as well as to cultural biases inherent in their models of biological positivism. Moreover, in science and in the public imagination, identical twins have pretty much become the gold standard for understanding what is posited as a dichotomy between nature and culture, and twins studies themselves have come to define the nature/nurture debates (Conley 2004). Despite the alleged interest in nature and culture or heredity and environment, environment and biology are underanalyzed, as are twins as a biosocial phenomenon that in a variety of ways acts to fill up the spaces between nature and culture. The environmental anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1976, 105) refers to the culturalization of nature and the naturalization of culture as a way of bridging the nature/culture divide. Sometimes twins talk about themselves in ways similar to the ways of those who research them, and sometimes they do not. Unlike researchers who take their own culture for granted, twins reveal a great deal about core assumptions of their culture and are quite self-conscious as they do so. Twins talk does not reduce life experiences to a selection of testable independent and dependent variables. The response of twins to both positive and negative societal stereotypes of twins both bridges the exotic and the mundane and results in a cogent critique of society. It is my intention, in this book, to subject twins researchers, as well as twins, to cultural analysis.

••

This chapter started with Lindholm’s (2001) parable of Mulla’s Who am I? question. Mulla’s dilemma takes on a new meaning in the case of identical twins. What is a lived life like when there is someone who is walking around with your face—the primary identifier of your body self? Clearly, identical twins raise a host of questions about the